Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Shantih Shantih Shantih

Vaginas: We Can Talk About Them But We Can’t Use Them

I have lost count of the number of times the word “Vagina” has been used on TV in the last two weeks. Apparently the censors have come to their senses and realised that actual names for body parts are not bad things. And yes, technically, I am relieved to have fewer instances of “hooha”, “vajayjay” and all those other nonsensical terms. But I swear it’s as if the TV writers are all 11 year old boys sitting around the writers’ room and cracking themselves up by saying their new “naughty” word over and over. And yes, that bothers me. The whole giggly-naughtiness when talking about a body part. Are arms and eyes this funny? No? Then why all the fuss about things in the “bathing suit area”. (Penis has also had a startling amount of punchline material, most notably in the Parks and Recreation season opener.)

But here’s the problem. For as much as we get to natter on about the reproductive systems of women, we seem to be adverse to writing anything else about them. Or hiring them to write about themselves.

This fall TV season was initially chokablock with promising premises about women; shows that would give fantastic opportunities to explore women’s changing roles in our culture were on offer for the first time in a long while. It was with no small amount of glee that I added The Playboy Club , Pan Am and Prime Suspect to the TiVo* rota.

Joke was on me, I guess.

The Playboy Club–now taking a well-deserved dirtnap–had the promise to talk about how women are often forced into sexual servitude in order to make anything close to a living wage. There was the opportunity to explore whether or not softcore porn is truly liberating. Does sexual servitude without actual sex give women the better end of the deal? Or does it end up hurting more than it helps? But no. Instead we got some weird storyline about Eddie Cibrian (who IS this guy?) being The Hottest Man In Chicago and running for some office while disentangling from the mob. I can hardly stay awake typing that sentence and there was no way I would keep tuning in to the show.

Pan Am is still on the air. It’ll probably last the whole season because there seems to be an odd attachment to it over at ABC. As a woman who worked in the travel industry long after it became deglamourised, I was eager to see a show that would feature interesting storylines about how women dealt with the odd offering of Flight Attendant jobs. I worked alongside more than one grounded flight attendant–women who got old, got married, gained weight–and were shunted from their stewardess role into behind-the-scenes dronery at reservation phone pools. Their stories were fascinating and sad and a goldmine for any writer. Pan Am the show could be exploring those ideas and talking about how sexual servitude was whitewashed to create interest in low-paying and ultimately deadend careers that would enrich the men at the top of the company. Instead, it’s Love Boat in the sky. With spies.

Prime Suspect has the best shot at presenting women’s stories. And it’s doing so by having a woman who is forced into pseudomasculinity.

Where are the women writers? Even if they are on staff in one way or another it appears to me that they’re being shouted down by people who think making the same mistake over and over again is better than making good stories.

It’s even worse than what you’re describing. Because the two shows set in the ’60s were created by people who seem to believe that the attraction of Mad Men is in recreating the period, whereas the attraction is actually the critique of the period. And Prime Suspect, of course, is created by people who think that Helen Mirren didn’t do it well enough.

As to how Mad Men has played out, since I stopped watching it I’ll have to take your word for the fact that they’ve moved into a critique-the-times phase. The early episodes I watched all seemed to merely showcase the times, and that was what turned me off.

Prime Suspect….I don’t even know where to start. I will say, though, that the sexism in the pilot episode was cartoonish in the extreme.

The most recent season of Mad Men, Don was dating a woman the audience really liked, smart and strong, who totally had his number about his bs but loved him anyway, and ended up getting engaged to a very young thing because he saw her sitting with his kids and it looked juuuuuust like a Norman Rockwell painting. And he’s having drinking problems. And meanwhile Peggy is finding that she likes her job more than the men in her life, and is trying to work out how she feels about that. But she also feels that Don will take credit for her ideas, because he can.

We watch more documentaries on Netflix than we do network TV anymore. I am tired of having my intelligence insulted. The relatively rare shows that I love have all gotten axed. (Stargate Universe, Eureka, and Homicide–oh, did you happen to notice that the one thing those shows have in common is that they were axed by the idiots at NBC who also think that WRESTLING should have the prime-time Friday night spot on the SYFY channel? Don’t get me started.)

The only place where I’ll beg to differ is that I personally could not STAND Stargate:Universe. Of course, I may have borne it better if it weren’t put forth as part of the SG franchise, as it was so tonally different from the predecessors.

The blog post I meant to write today (but forgot about until just now) was about how we watch TV now at our house. We’ve got Netflix and use Plex and a server to warehouse all of our DVDs and Blu-Rays. So what we mostly do is wait until a show has good acclaim and at least one season under it’s belt. Then we catch up on either Netflix (Sons of Anarchy) or DVD (Justified). That way we aren’t burned by the cancellation button and we can spend our valuable time watching GOOD shows. Or even repeats of old shows. I can’t count the number of times I’ve burned off an evening knitting in front of The Wire.

Hmmm, I fell in love with SGU right from the start, which is more than I can say about a lot of shows. I was at least glad that they didn’t end the series by having everyone blown up in a huge explosion (although when has that ever stopped a sci-fi series from continuing, given the existence of those oh-so-useful wormholes?), but put everyone in stasis so that they could come back when NBC Universal finally makes a GOOD business decision and sells the SyFy channel to someone who cares.

I hate Ghost Hunters, too, FWIW. I am just waiting for them to cancel “Haven” now.

I like Linda Holmes’ commentaries a lot, and she had just recently bemoaned the execution of the very shows you mention, and then rebounded with this nice critique of the way TV is showing men how to behave.

Ooooh! Didn’t read that until just now. She makes some very great points! Of course, the answer to her question is that Television has for too long now been relying on a very narrow demographic for its writing staff. Most TV writers are young, male…ugh. I’m starting to make assertions and realising that I don’t have fresh statistics to back them up so I’ll pause.

But yeah. She got it right. Men do NOT have a reliable television mirror either. Of course, I got a little bit tired of the man-as-buffoon schtick back in the early 00s when that was pretty much CBS’ Monday Night Lineup. (Everybody Loves Raymond. Except his shrill and pedantic wife.)

I’m going to have to dig up her piece about the shows I mentioned, because I’ve seen a lot of critics write about them but not specifically about how they squander the rich storytelling opportunity of the feminist point of view.

Writers’ Advice

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner